“Okay,” she said.
He could feel her watching him as he went through the doorway into his room.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “I’ve been here before. I’ll be fine after a little sleep.”
“Okay,” she said again.
But he could tell that she was worried. He knew she would not get any rest until she was certain that he was going to be okay. He wanted to tell her that there was no need for her to keep a vigil. He wasn’t ill. And he sure as hell didn’t need therapy. He just needed some sleep.
He fell onto the bed, closed his eyes and tumbled into the darkness before he could think of a way to reassure her.
Twenty-six
Really, he had been born for a life of crime.
Nick Sawyer stood in the darkened house and listened to the currents of emptiness that resonated from the shadows. The dead woman’s family had put the house on the market a couple of weeks back. The For Sale sign in the front yard read “Motivated Seller.”
The house was almost empty. There were a few odd pieces of furniture and some pictures left, but the heirs had sold off most of the contents shortly after the old lady’s death. There was probably nothing to discover in the way of clues to the mystery he had been sent to solve, but he had wanted to get a feel for the victim. Standing here, in her front room, somehow gave him a sense of her that he had not been able to obtain with his online research or his chats with the neighbors.
He moved through the heavily draped living room until the traces of seething energy on the floor brought him to a halt.
“Hello,” he said to the shadows. “This is where he whacked you, isn’t it? You were watching television. They said your body was found in a big easy chair. The guy next door said your son helped himself to your big-screen TV on the day of the funeral. Let’s see what else you can tell me.”
He went upstairs to the bedroom, noting the little elevator that had been installed at some point in the past.
“Too frail to make it up the stairs under your own steam,” he said. “You were an easy target, weren’t you? You couldn’t have run, even if you had tried. But you didn’t.”
At the top of the stairs, he went down the hall to the master bedroom, savoring the chill of intense awareness and the adrenaline rush.
This business of poking around in the private affairs of other people was a lot more fun than the hot books business. He had gotten a kick out of chatting up the old woman’s neighbors earlier that day, too. He was almost as good a con as he was a burglar. Not that it had taken any real skill to get people to talk. Folks had been only too willing to tell him how the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law had ignored her for the most part, except when they had come around looking for money.
He studied the bedroom. There was an ancient chest of drawers standing against one wall, but everything else had been cleared out.
He crossed the room and started opening the drawers.
It was weird how a person’s entire future could get changed by a small twist of fate, he thought. If he hadn’t met Gwen and Abby in that hellhole of an institution that went by the name of the Summerlight Academy, he would have become a happy world-class jewel thief by now. His ability to see in the dark was superior to the latest and greatest in high-tech military night-vision goggles. And he was very, very good with locks and computers.
But Gwen and Abby had insisted that he make his living in a semi-legitimate manner. To avoid the endless nagging of his sisters, he had allowed Abby to teach him the ropes of the paranormal books business. It had been a good gig for the past few years. He had made a lot of money because he worked what Abby called the deep end of the market—the dangerous underworld of paranoid, obsessive collectors who would pay any amount of money to obtain the volumes they coveted.
Although he had an affinity for hot books—he figured that was no big deal because he had a natural sensitivity for just about anything that had serious value—he was not particularly interested in the rare volumes he brokered. When you got right down to it, he was just a go-between—a well-paid go-between, but a go-between nonetheless. The only part he actually enjoyed was the night work. So he craved the illicit thrill of sneaking around in the dark, learning other people’s secrets. So sue me. But first you have to catch me. Not gonna happen.
Gwen said he got his kicks from this kind of thing because it allowed him to use his senses to the max. She claimed he would have been just as happy if he had engaged his psychic talents as a cop. But he knew the truth. He liked rummaging around in other people’s secrets because his own past was concealed behind a locked door, one that he had never been able to open—and he was damn good at getting through locked doors. Thus far, every key he had tried had failed to open the door to his past.
The sperm donor bank his mother had used to conceive him had burned to the ground years ago. Half of his family history—the part pertaining to his father—had been destroyed in the fire. He had lost most of the other half of his past when his mother, a single woman who had been orphaned when she was an infant, died in a car accident the year he turned ten. There had followed a series of foster homes and, finally, the Summerlight Academy.
It was there that he had met his real family, his sisters, Gwen and Abby. They were the reason he had stayed at Summerlight. It would have been a simple matter to bail from the school using his rapidly developing talents, but he could not leave Gwen and Abby behind. They had needed him to protect them from the crazies and the bullies. It was the first time anyone had ever needed him. It was like he suddenly had a job to do. He had made sure the three of them had stuck together until graduation.
After leaving Summerlight, Gwen and Abby had reversed their roles, becoming the protectors. They had done their best to keep him from taking up a life of crime, even though he had assured them he would be brilliant at the business. He’d gone along with the more legit gig to keep peace in the family. But at times like this, when he was standing alone in the dark inside someone else’s house, he knew that he had missed his true calling.
He closed the last drawer and went to the closet. It was empty except for a pair of sturdy white walking shoes of the style that they sold to little old ladies who were unsteady on their feet.
He found the small safe concealed behind a wall panel. It was still locked, but it required less than forty seconds to get it open. The stack of bills inside told him everything he needed to know about the old lady.
“A little paranoid, weren’t you, Granny?” he said to the emptiness. “You didn’t trust anyone, not even your own son. Well, you knew him better than anyone else, didn’t you? After all, you were his mother.”
There was one other item in the safe, an old-fashioned checkbook register.
He shoved the cash and the checkbook into the small black backpack he wore and went downstairs. He exited the house the same way he had entered, through a rear window.
He found the car where he had left it several blocks away in a parking lot behind a grocery store. He drove the nondescript vehicle back to the airport and turned it in at the rental counter. He had used one of his spare sets of identification to rent the car. He liked to keep a lot of extras on hand, not only for himself, but also for Gwen and Abby. Just in case.
It occurred to him that Abby probably wouldn’t need that kind of security backup anymore now that she was marrying into the Coppersmith family. That clan took care of its own. And something about the energy between Gwen and Judson Coppersmith told him that she might not need her brother much longer, either.
The thought of losing his sisters to the Coppersmiths threatened to stir up the dark waters deep inside. Since their days at Summerlight, Abby and Gwen had been there for him. Abby had taught him the ropes of the hot books business. Gwen had always been around to drive the nightmare monsters back into the depths. The bad dreams hadn’t surfaced in a while, but he knew they were still swimming around down there in the bottomless pit.